Accuracy: 1 m (3 ft)

Click on any of the images for the full-sized picture.

28-Feb-2004 -- This confluence point visit proved to be quite a time consuming exercise. Myself, Jake, Richard and "Elvis" the dog left Kalgoorlie around 11:30am on Saturday morning for the planned 870km trek to the point. We travelled west along the Great Eastern Highway to a place called Yellowdine, which consists of a couple of old houses and a 24hour truck stop. It greatest claim to fame is that it briefly featured in the 1981 film "Road Games" which starred Stacy Keach and Jamie Lee Curtis. That film would rate up in the top 10 of the worst films I have ever sat through.

From Yellowdine we left the last of the blacktop and travelled north along the Lake Seabrook Road to the vermin proof fence. Lake Seabrook is quite an impressive expanse of water for these parts, 20km in length and 7km at its widest point, although it didn't look very deep. It would be a very good lake to water-ski on after a couple of decent rains.

We kept travelling north along the vermin proof fence track till it crossed the Bullfinch Evanston Road which we then followed up to the abandoned Atkinson Find gold mine. From here we travelled west along the Mount Jackson Road to Victoria hill and then north along a rough track for approximately 22km till we intersected the 30-south latitude line. We were now 10 km east of the CP and decided to follow one of the cleared drillrig gridlines that were located throughout the area. This brought us to within 8km of the CP and now we had to travel the rest through virgin bush. Ever conscious of staking a tyre we slowly and cautiously made our way through the moderately thick scrub till it got too nasty to continue. We were only now 3.5km away and after a short 40-minute walk we arrived at the CP just as the sun was going down.

The necessary photos were taken and we immediately set off back to the vehicle before it got too dark. We arrived back at vehicle at 7:30pm, had a couple of beers and admired the magnificent night sky. With absolutely no light pollution out there, the whole sky was blanketed with stars, a view that unfortunately you don't get to see these days from your own backyard. Jake determined which way was south from the "Southern Cross" and we checked it against the GPS compass - not a bad result.

We knew the return journey through the scrub at night would be difficult, it proved worse than we anticipated. Even though we had stored our entry track in the Garmin GPS, the 4 to 8 metre error was enough for us to continually keep losing it in the darkness. 4 hours and 2 tyres later we eventually made it back to the point were we left the track. It had taken us all that time to cover just 6.5km. Relieved to have made back to a decent track we set off for the 45 hour trip home, this time travelling through Bullfinch and Southern Cross. We finally arrived back at Kalgoorlie at 4:45am Sunday morning just as the sky was beginning to light up with the dawn sun.